Thermal images of electrical devices, mechanical devices and structures can be useful for analyzing the performance thereof, both during design and development, for example, for design optimization purposes, and during operational service, for example, for inspection and maintenance purposes. These thermal images may be captured, displayed, stored and transferred to a computer workstation by an infrared (IR) camera, according to methods known to those skilled in the art. A particular example of such a camera, is the Fluke Ti 20 Thermal Imager.
A displayed thermal image of an object, or scene, is composed of corrected digital image data that has been mapped and scaled to an array of pixels, wherein a color, or a gray-scale value, of each pixel corresponds to a detected temperature, or temperature range, of the corresponding portion of the object. Although such an image can indicate to a viewer, the general location of hot spots, and can give an idea of temperature gradients over the object, more focused and quantitative methods have been proposed for viewing select subsets of data, for example, line temperature profiles, taken from the large quantity of temperature data that makes up each thermal image. Even so there is still a need for more efficient and selective methods for viewing these select subsets of data, along with the interactive user interfaces to enable these methods.